Surviving the cobbles!

Well the good news from yesterday is that I survived the cobbles of Belgium and had a really good race in Gooik, a 140km UCI 1.2 race in Belgium! After a stressful lead up to the race, where me and Gen didn’t actually know if we could get a ride to the race until 7pm the night before, this race turned out to be a very successful one for our team, with 4 riders making the front peleton.

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As well as our normal Belgium team (Claire, Gen, Alex, Oriane and I), we had 2 guest riders joining us for the race- one from Italy and one from Luxembourg. This made for a very interesting team briefing, with the Italian only speaking Italian, Gen who only speaks English, and a team manager who speaks French and Dutch! There were multiple translations going on the whole time. Luckily the briefing for this race was pretty simple-get to the front before the cobbled climbs, otherwise you will definitely be dropped and your race will be over!!!

Team talk: everyone looking confused, with me just finding the whole thing quite funny!!

Climbing the Bosberg

In total there were 3 sections of cobbles in this race, the first two being over 2 of the famous climbs which are used in the Tour of Flanders- the Muur and the Bosberg. These climbs are HARD! They reach 20% at the steepest points, and when you are riding up a cobbled hill, you can’t get out of your seat or your wheels will slip, so you just have to grind your way up them. I managed to get over these hills with the front peloton of around 50 riders, with 7 breakaway riders in front of us. Also in the group were Gen, Alex and Claire. Out of the 200 riders who started the race, only the girls who made this group would be allowed to finish- racing in Belgium is definitely not like NZ where everyone can always finish if they want to!

This group stayed together for the rest of the race and I finished 33rd in the sprint, with Alex and Claire close behind. Unfortunately Gen suffered a mechanical in the last 20 km (her seat fell off!!!!), so was unable to finish.

The finish

After the race, its safe to say Gen and I were pretty smashed from 140km of pain!! However, we were very lucky to come home to an amazing dinner, cooked by Gen’s sister who is over to visit for a few days.

I am now on the train (again!) back to Dijon, where I will stay for a few days before the next French cup race on Friday. After that my mum is coming to stay for a few weeks, so I am really excited to see her!